i miss you.

Seen this?:
“The inventor and computer scientist is serious about his health because if it fails him he might not live long enough to see humanity achieve immortality, a seismic development he predicts in his new book is no more than 20 years away.“

I’d like to read that book. See what this dude is up to.

Seen this? I’d like to write that book, with the addition of a few of my own ideas to make the story into a journey, even more amusing. If you enter the site, click on the middle tag and then on each item…you’ll find a quaint little blurb about every item he’s selling, and if someone actually bought it, he includes their picture, story and geographic locale.

Which reminds me, I have GOT to start selling instead of buying on ebay. I love ebay.

Is George Stephanopoulis going to join Nightline? I haven’t watched Nightline in years probably, and when I do it’s at my grandparent’s house, but ever since seeing George in War Room 3 years ago, I’ve had a general and unkickable curiosity about the turns his career makes. It’s good movie; I, quite frankly, get pretty caught up in it, about how they did it. About the plays and fumbles. Plus it’s amusing to see how far everyone has come. They were different, absolutely unsophisticated people back then.

What a quick talk with Oaklawn Superhero confirmed this morning is that it has been a tough week. It’s been annoyingly brutal. I don’t complain about work anymore the way that I used to, especially on the blog, but I can’t discount it’s tax on my soul. How it kills and life responsibilities kill my ability to reach out to people during the week. It’s like, find me on the weekend because that’s the only time I can talk to anyone at length. Actually, that’s bullshit. It’s just how things feel, I guess. My perception. But regardless, my perception about conversations this week is that they’ve been shit. I’m not even counting them. Unsustainable, pappy crap that’s left me starving for the real stuff.

I’m leaving tomorrow to go skiing for the first time in 9 or 10 years. I’m embarking on a hugeass road trip for the first time in more than 10 years. It’s Wednesday, and there’s a tent assembled in my living room that I’ve just been scooting around when I need to get to a certain area of the room. My furniture has been scuttled to other rooms and lain upside down against other walls so that room could be made for the tent. The randomness of home life. I haven’t spent any time there except to sleep.

I can’t help it….
I like this idea.
dork.

And, ooh; how fun!

Fresh from the Eyes of OS:

Fans of Procrastination Say It Boosts Control, Preserves Self-Esteem
February 9, 2005; Page B1, WSJ

Paul Kedrosky claims to be among the world’s worst procrastinators. “I literally circle topics like a dog trying to tromp down a nice place to sleep,” says the 39-year-old high-tech executive. “I try to figure out how to do something without, you know, doing it.”

That means that Mr. Kedrosky sometimes has to play a game of chicken with a new assignment. “I take this approach of trying to outlast the obligation,” he says. If and when that tactic fails, he can switch gears and become completely deadline driven. But that doesn’t mean someone can arbitrarily assign him an early deadline and he’ll fall for it. “I want to know when the wheels are going to fall off,” he says.

For Mr. Kedrosky, it’s all part of “this nagging suspicion that a lot of the things that I get asked to do I don’t actually have to do.” He’s particularly wary, he says, because the advent of e-mail means that managers no longer have to look you in the eye when they tell you to do something, allowing for the rise of what he calls “drive-by obligations.”

But don’t try telling that to psychologists who have studied the practitioners of dallying. They — along with most of corporate America — seem pretty fed up with procrastinators’ endless searches for the right moment to undertake tasks.

“The misperception of our culture is that it’s OK to procrastinate,” says Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University. “A bigger misperception,” he adds, “is that it isn’t a serious problem.” He says research indicates that 20% of adults identify themselves as chronic procrastinators.

It isn’t that hard to spot the procrastinators. They fetch coffee that they don’t drink. When given a deadline, they’ll ask, “But what’s the real drop-dead deadline?” They get a spurt of energy when they’re under pressure, and they create mental to-do lists because they’re not foolish enough to leave a paper trail to document their vice.

Jane Burka, a psychologist and co-author of the book “Procrastination,” says procrastinators aren’t so much lollygaggers as they are people who fear failure, or success or being controlled. For example, she says, some people seek a ready-made excuse for not doing the job as well as it could have been done. “It’s a way of protecting yourself from having your true abilities evaluated,” she says. Other dawdlers worry that if they’re successful, they’ll be required to produce more, Ms. Burka says. Finally, procrastination in the workplace can be a way of saying, “You can’t make me do it” without uttering those risky words.

But given the expanding demands of the 24/7 office, couldn’t procrastination be a good thing, allowing time for harebrained requests to evaporate in the heat of their own stupidity? After all, it may be true, as Henry Ford said, that you can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do. But can’t you build a reputation on what you’re not going to do and thereby prevent dumb requests from ever being made?

Put it that way, and Dr. Burka’s judgment is a bit less harsh. “Yes,” she says. “Procrastination by definition isn’t the problem. It’s whether it interferes with your productivity or self-esteem.”
Cheryl Litwin, who seems to be a perfectly healthy procrastinator, says she didn’t start to dawdle until her company started to require detailed reports on conferences, telephone calls and business visits, including data on who attended and how much lunch cost. “I have started to procrastinate as a control thing,” she says. And when the tasks don’t disappear, she adds, she just produces “the adrenaline I need to create and focus.” She even wonders if procrastination mightn’t be Mother Nature’s version of Ritalin.

Diane Danielson, the executive director of the Downtown Women’s Club in Boston, maintains that “procrastination” is too strong a word to describe her approach. “I call it ‘going with the flow,’ ” says the single mother. If, for example, she can’t find something when she’s packing for a business trip, she realizes the time has finally arrived to clean her closet. (”If I actually feel like cleaning a closet, it’s very rare, so I better go with it,” she notes.)

Sure, there are a couple of things hanging over her head at the moment: She has wanted to write a business plan for the past two years. But at least she has signed up for a course that teaches her how to write one, and she swears that she has never actually missed a deadline.

A Redmond, Wash., software executive says he has a long list of ways he likes to procrastinate. The list includes checking sports scores, news sites and blogs on the Internet; instant messaging friends; reading and deleting chain e-mails from his mother; and searching for old friends and video clips on the Web. “Someday,” he says, “I might even write a grant proposal to start an international foundation for hungry children.”

Leslie Levine is a motivational speaker in Northbrook, Ill. Last week, she put off working on a presentation so that she could play Sonic Adventure on her son’s Game Cube. Look at the bright side, she says. “I didn’t eat anything.” And that’s something else about procrastination, she says. It’s “a backwards reward, like eating dessert first.”